children's company

▪ theatre

also called  boys' company 

      any of a number of troupes of boy actors whose performances enjoyed great popularity in Elizabethan England. The young actors were drawn primarily from choir schools attached to the great chapels and cathedrals, where they received musical training and were taught to perform in religious dramas and classical Latin plays. By the time of Henry VIII, groups such as the Children of the Chapel and the Children of Paul's were often called upon to present plays and to take part in ceremonies and pageants at court. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, these groups were formed into highly professional companies, usually consisting of 8 to 12 boys, who gave public performances outside the court. The choirmasters of the companies functioned as managers, directors, writers of music and plays, and designers of masques and pageants, in addition to performing their regular duties of training the boys to sing and act.

      In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, these companies were so popular that they posed a serious threat to the professional men's companies. Shakespeare has Hamlet refer scornfully to the child actors as “little eyases,” or nestling birds, that “are now the fashion.” Children acted in the first Blackfriars Theatre (c. 1576–80), and in 1600 a syndicate representing the Children of the Chapel acquired a lease on the second Blackfriars Theatre, where the boys performed many important plays, including those of John Marston (Marston, John) and Ben Jonson (Jonson, Ben). By roughly 1610 the children's companies had greatly declined in popularity, aided perhaps by the companies' indulgence in political criticism.

Additional Reading

Michael Shapiro, Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare's Time and Their Plays (1977) and Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages (1994).

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